In you, that journey is.

Today is a holiday for me. For six years now, twice a year, I take a specific day out of my life and sit down to watch HBO’s production of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America. It’s a six-hour event with the best actors of our time and the most brilliant playwright of our generation.

It seems so perfectly fitting that it should fall this year on the eve of my seeing a doctor to begin hormones.

I first watched it when I was seventeen, just barely a freshman in college. My first gay friend, J., a year older than I, asked me to sit down and watch it with him. We both fell in love with its language, its poetry and cinematography, its brilliance and its politics. From then on, for the remainder of college, we watched Angels every “Reading Day,” the no-exam Wednesday of finals week dedicated to studying and resting. Every December and May, J. and I stopped moving, stopped working, sat down and took part in what became our tradition, one we’ve been proud to share with dozens of others over the years and one we still come back to year after year. We’ve both since graduated; he is working on his nursing degree, and I on my own in political science. Almost a thousand miles away from each other, and seemingly thousands more from that old life when this all began.

Life has changed so much.

Angels teaches me my history. My queer inheritance. My sensibility. My politics. But it’s come to teach me change as well, and constancy – the meaning of both. Just as I’ve watched over and over again as the characters grow and fail and move, it has watched me do the same over the years. I began my life with Angels as a 17-year-old, barely lesbian identified girl with long hair and no sense of self or community or queerness. I wanted to be a pastor, to mend the damages religion has done. And now, I find myself 23, queer-identified and beginning transition, committed to my work, as a PhD student and a practicing buddhist. Wanting to mend the damages politics has done. And still, (at least) twice a year, I watch Angels. I say the lines with the characters, as though I am part of the script. And I am – for it is part of me.

Life has changed so little.

I’m talking to J. now, and we’re remembering our first time. Even across the miles and the time, J. and I will always have Angels.

Even across the miles of my own body, I will always have Angels.

For these both – constancy and change – I am grateful.

“…Such great voyages in this world do not any more exist. But every day of your lives the miles, the voyage, between that place and this one, you cross. Every day. You understand me? In you, that journey is.”

Advertisement